The Faber Book Of Irish Verse

Taking the death of Yeats in 1939 as its starting point and ending in the 1980s, The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry offers unusually generous selections from the work of ten writers - Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Paul Durcan, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian. Edited by Paul Muldoon, himself widely regarded as the leading Irish poet of his generation, this anthology provides a fine introduction to the most consistently impressive Irish poets after Yeats.

Reference guide to poetry anthologies with descriptions and evaluations of each anthology.

Forty chapters, written by leading scholars across the world, describe the latest thinking on modern Irish poetry. The Handbook begins with a consideration of Yeats's early work, and the legacy of the 19th century. The broadly chronological areas which follow, covering the period from the 1910s through to the 21st century, allow scope for coverage of key poetic voices in Ireland in their historical and political context. From the experimentalism of Beckett, MacGreevy, and others of the modernist generation, to the refashioning of Yeats's Ireland on the part of poets such as MacNeice, Kavanagh, and Clarke mid-century, through to the controversially titled post-1969 'Northern Renaissance' of poetry, this volume will provide extensive coverage of the key movements of the modern period. The Handbook covers the work of, among others, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Brendan Kennelly, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Michael Longley, Medbh McGuckian, and Ciaran Carson. The thematic sections interspersed throughout - chapters on women's poetry, religion, translation, painting, music, stylistics - allow for comparative studies of poets north and south across the century. Central to the guiding spirit of this project is the Handbook's consideration of poetic forms, and a number of essays explore the generic diversity of poetry in Ireland, its various manipulations, reinventions and sometimes repudiations of traditional forms. The last essays in the book examine the work of a 'new' generation of poets from Ireland, concentrating on work published in the last two decades by Justin Quinn, Leontia Flynn, Sinead Morrissey, David Wheatley, Vona Groarke, and others.

The Great War in Irish Poetry explores the impact of the First World War on the work of W. B. Yeats, Robert Graves, and Louis MacNeice in the period 1914-45, and on three contemporary Northern Irish poets, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, and Michael Longley. Its concern is to place their work, andmemory of the Great War, in the context of Irish politics and culture in the twentieth century. The historical background to Irish involvement in the Great War is explained, as are the ways in which issues raised in 1912-20 still reverberate in the politics of remembrance in Northern Ireland,particularly through such events as the Home Rule cause, the loss of the Titanic, the Battle of the Somme, the Easter Rising. While the Great War is perceived as central to English culture, and its literature holds a privileged position in the English literary canon, the centrality of the Great War to Irish writing has seldom been recognised. This book shows first, that despite complications in Irish domestic politicswhich led to the repression of memory of the Great War, Irish poets have been drawn throughout the century to the events and images of 1914-18. This engagement is particularly true of those writing in the 'troubled' Northern Ireland of the last thirty years. The second main concern is the extent towhich recognition of the importance of the Great War in Irish writing has itself become a casualty of competing versions of the literary canon.